Agile + DevOps East 2018 - Agile Product Development

Wednesday, November 7

Do you have measurement dysfunction on your program? Are you trying to measure teams and extrapolate each team’s status to the program? That doesn’t work. Teams have personal statuses, and you can’t add them together to understand the program state. But you can use a handful of program measurements that help everyone understand where the program is and where it’s headed. Instead of trying to “scale” measurements, take a new approach. Join Johanna Rothman to learn to use and share quantitative and qualitative program measurements that show everyone the program state. It starts with...

Your team's been trained to deliver new features in a short time frame. You're estimating your work using abstractions like story points, and the predictability and quality of delivery have clearly improved. However, you still get asked every December to estimate year-long initiatives for annual budgeting. How agile can an organization be when the finance department is still thinking about large-batch projects with fixed cost, scope, and time? Robert Pieper will talk about how to mitigate financial risk and improve return on investment by working in smaller batches. Using financial...

When many think of modernizing or altering their firm with the goal of staying competitive in the market, thoughts of expensive, cutting-edge concepts that are difficult to implement usually come to mind. But innovation doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. The fact is that pure modernism is focusing on the benefit of the customer, the team, and the business. It does not always have to be overly technical or costly. As with speed, the most economical method to determine if a company is pursuing innovation is to look internally and discover how the workforce is being utilized. Giancarlo Di...

Thursday, November 8

Open work areas, a focus on collaboration and conversations, and group events that seem to require verbal fluency ... It may feel like the agile ecosystem is designed with extroverts in mind. But science tells us that introverts make up almost half of the workforce, and they may struggle to be productive in an agile environments. In fact, introverts might even shy away from agile opportunities because of the radical collaboration it requires. In this interactive session, Julee Everett will teach you to recognize the traits of an extrovert and an introvert through self-identification....

The Second City, an improvisational comedy club that launched the careers of comedians such as Chris Farley, Tina Fey, and Steve Carell, has delivered a successful product to audiences nightly for almost sixty years. How do they do it? By recognizing the power of feedback. Brian Eno, a pioneer in the music industry who produced albums for U2 and Coldplay, relies on a feedback generation system to ensure the best performances of the bands he works with. Likewise, the lean startup movement has uncovered a similar pattern of organizations that thrive on experimentation and learning. John...

Agile methodologies do not traditionally allot space, time, or processes for user experience design. Some teams try to accommodate design via separate design sprints that are somewhat coupled to the team's backlog, but these are typically performed two or three sprints ahead. Increasingly, designers are demanding that teams do big, upfront design phases outside of a team's backlog, followed by agile development sprints to implement the design. As markets mature and competition increases, more and more companies must become design-focused or even design-led. Ian and Mary will show you why...

In the world of agile product development, user stories are like onions ... and no, that doesn’t mean they stink or they make you cry (although they have been known to do both). Writing user stories is still one of the hardest crafts in agile product development today. We all know that a good user story can be the difference between a low-performing Scrum team and a high-performing one. Katrina Thacker will introduce the "onion pattern" as a paradigm for creating great user stories, and she will lead you through a series of hands-on exercises to practice applying the pattern. In this...